Title: Changing the Place of Narrative in Biography: From Form to Method
Abstract: Abstract This contribution revisits the author's 1999 Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture to discuss the critiques made of the genre of biography and to sketch out her alternative practice of close attention to narrative in the texts and lives it analyses. It argues that the earlier work's critiques of 'realist' narratives, of the trope of self-creation, and of the privileging of identification in biography remain convincing. But the essay concludes that readers' and writers' investments in identification and agency make biography, as a genre, resistant to revision despite the value of narrative analysis for historical life writing. Keywords: Emilia Dilkenarrative analysiscritique of biographyagencyhistorical biographygenre Notes 1. This contribution began as a talk in the first of a series of seminars, funded by the ESRC, on 'Narrative Studies in Interdisciplinary Perspective: Theories, Methodologies and Revisions,' organised by the Centre for Narrative and Auto/Biographical Studies at the University of Edinburgh. I am grateful to Liz Stanley for inviting me; to her and the other organisers of the series for its incitement to think in good company; to Andrea Salter for handling many of the details; to other speakers and participants for their ideas and challenges; and to Maria Tamboukou for her conversation and ideas along the way as well as her response here. In the notes, citations of my archive, my own work, and the scholarship on which I drew are limited; for full citations, see Israel, Names, 'Introduction' and endnotes. 2. As will become clear, I am using the term 'narrative' loosely. In practice one doesn't just analyse narratives; one works with particular kinds of narratives and makes use, often, of a vocabulary of genre—although that too is a term I use loosely and at some distance from explicit theories of genre. 3. For further details of Strong/Pattison/Dilke's life and full citations of sources, see Israel; see also Askwith Askwith , Betty. Lady Dilke: A Biography . London : Chatto and Windus , 1969 . [Google Scholar] and the excellent ODNB entry by Fraser Fraser , Hilary. 'Dilke, Emilia Francis.' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . H. C. G. Matthew Brian Harrison Oxford : OUP , 2004 . [Google Scholar]. 4. While I did not engage with his many wider arguments, I was first prompted to think about this issue by Liu Liu , Alan. 'Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail.' Representations 32 Autumn 1990 : 75 113 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] 1990. 5. There are many excellent exceptions to this, but I have tried to avoid naming, either through praise or criticism, specific works and authors. Works singled out for criticism might, and usually are, works which I admire in many respects and which contribute important analysis and knowledge to wider scholarship. Moreover, particular works named would simply be those I happen to have encountered, an archive determined by whim, inspiration, discipline, subfield, institutional location, language competencies, and pure chance at times. In omitting specific authors and times, I do not in any sense wish to imply that I have been alone in considering and resisting particular challenges or that my path around them has been the only one. 6. The possible citations of others' work here are endless; see note 4 above. However, Judith Walkowitz's work, teaching, and advice through many years were crucial to my awakening to these issues; see especially Walkowitz 1992 Walkowitz , Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1992 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 7. In this, my work is distinct from some more recent writers on Pattison/Dilke, most notably Mansfield's Mansfield , Elizabeth. 'Articulating Authority: Emilia Dilke's Early Essays and Reviews.' Victorian Periodicals Review 31 . 1 Spring 1998 : 76 86 . [Google Scholar]. 8. There is another kind of identification elicited by some biographies, alongside or very occasionally instead of identification with the name in the title: identification with the author, or rather, with the author's persona in the text. The reader may be invited to join the author as detective or to engage with the author's depicted emotions. The self-depiction of the author as an available object of identification is sometimes, wrongly, conflated with making visible the work of interpretation. 9. The overall relationship of Elizabeth Mansfield's work on Dilke to mine is not clear to me, but it is very different in its commitment to a narrative of self-creation (Mansfield Mansfield , Elizabeth. . 'Emilia Dilke: Self-Fashioning and the Nineteenth Century.' Demoor , 19 39 . [Google Scholar], 'Emilia Dilke'; see also Demoor Demoor , Marysa Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves, and Self-Fashioning 1880–1930 . Houndsmills, Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2004 . [Google Scholar] 9). 10. This is an immense set of issues, and each subset I have flagged surely evokes a range of citations or instances in the minds of different readers in particular locations. Discussions of agency overlap with discussions of will and intention and often with theories of resistance. In my own fields of history, the works of British Marxist historians (see Dworkin Dworkin , Dennis. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies . Durham : Duke UP , 1997 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and of James C. Scott Scott , James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts 1990 Yale UP New Haven .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] have been highly influential both in their specific arguments and in subsequent conversations; see also the work of Talal Asad Asad , Talal. Geneaologies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins UP , 1993 . [Google Scholar]. I am also indebted to Walter Johnson's essays on these questions. There is also a rich literature on these issues in philosophical thinking, with which I have extremely limited familiarity. There are versions of feminism that question or deny rather than exalt agency from a radical-feminist perspective, both in and out of the academy, these often follow the early work of Mackinnon Mackinnon , Catherine. 'Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 . 3 Spring 1982 : 515 544 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] (for a helpful exegesis, see Halley Halley , Janet. Split Decisions: When and How to Take a Break from Feminism . Princeton : Princeton UP , 2006 . [Google Scholar], 41–57; for an extra-academic site of this kind on the internet, see e.g. Twisty Faster's Faster , Twisty pseud. . 'I Blame the Patriarchy.' 19 May 2008 . < http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/ > [Google Scholar] 'I Blame the Patriarchy'). There are also psychoanalytic frameworks which de-center agency (e.g. J. Rose 26, 74).
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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